I recently had a reason to reach out to two Instagram influencers I follow. One of them goes by Tizzyent, his real name is Michael McWhorter. The other is Tom DeBlass, a very well-renowned Brazilian jiu-jitsu coach who also works with One Championship calling their matches.
I reached out to each of them individually because I’d seen a news story that disturbed me. In Philadelphia, someone the police think might be a young person has been dressing up in a scary Halloween mask and tailing joggers early in the morning — mostly women, though apparently some men too — saying disturbing things to get a reaction. It looks like this person may also be recording the interactions on his phone, for whatever reason.
I reached out to Tizzy and Tom for two somewhat similar reasons. If you don’t know Tizzy, he’s someone who uses his social media reach to identify individuals in Instagram posts who are behaving in outrageous, usually dangerous ways toward other people — in a lot of cases, men who are physically threatening or intimidating women. Tom, for his part, runs an organization called Buddies Over Bullies, which does something similar but with videos of kids bullying other kids. Some of those videos are genuinely horrific and have to be redacted.
I’ve never met Tizzy. I have had the pleasure of meeting Tom. He gave a seminar at a retreat in Tahoe connected to an organization focused on addiction recovery — a topic that’s close to my heart, and I know it’s close to his as well. Beyond the seminar, I got to sit across the dinner table from him and talk, and then, as luck would have it, we ended up riding to the airport together afterward. So I had a real chance to interact with him one-on-one.
What I can say about Tom is that he’s the real deal. What you see is what you get. The personality, the way he presents himself online, and the way he presents himself in person are exactly the same — the guy walks it like he talks it. I have a lot of respect for him. And I know Tizzy has a lot of respect within the community too, even though I’m sure he gets plenty of hate for what he does, and plenty of people resent it.
I reached out to both of them just to make sure they were aware of the situation in Philadelphia, and to see if they might want to use their platforms to help identify the person involved. I don’t know yet whether that’s happened. But here’s the larger point I want to make: I believe both of these men provide a genuinely valuable service in the modern internet age. They help identify people engaged in outrageous, dangerous behavior so that something can actually be done about it.
Let me try to explain why I think that matters. We’re only a few generations removed from being hunter-gatherers or farmers living in small communities. In those communities, you were known — people would recognize you, and if you needed help, there was a community there to give it. But if you stepped out of line, there were also people there to put you back in check. In our hyper-connected internet era, we’ve largely lost that sense of small community, and a lot of people clearly hide behind anonymity as a way to get away with behavior that’s completely inappropriate. What Tizzy and Tom do, each in their own way, is de-anonymize people who need to be dealt with, one way or another.
And “dealt with” means different things depending on who you ask. Tom gets some static online because people believe he advocates violence as a way of handling problems — he is, after all, a jiu-jitsu black belt and coach who teaches self-defense and believes people from all walks of life should learn martial arts. In Tizzy’s case, the remedy that usually gets suggested is law enforcement getting involved, or people simply being reported within their own community — to their family, or their employer. Sometimes that’s cost people their jobs, and that creates its own controversy.
But the common thread is this: if you’re a danger to other people, if you’re threatening people, if you’re acting out in violent or inappropriate ways, something needs to be done about it. And to be clear, I’m not saying people need to catch a beating for what they do. I’m not saying they need to lose their job or have their family abandon them. Some of the people you see in Tizzy’s videos look, to me, like they’re in a mental health crisis. What they need is mental health help. And in Tom’s videos, you often see kids engaging in violent behavior — the victims of that obviously need support, but the kids doing the bullying need something too, whether that’s intervention through their parents, or through Child Protective Services, or some other agency. Those people need help.
So I applaud both of these men for what they’re trying to do: de-anonymize the internet a bit, hold people accountable for their behavior, and put them in a position where — one way or another — they can either be punished or get the help they actually need.
One way or the other, we as a society need to get back to something closer to that small-community model: helping each other when we can, and holding each other accountable when we need to.